Darwin - Supply, Delivery Commissioning and Training of Equipment to Enhance Genomic Sequencing of COVID-19 Isolates

While Territory Pathology facilitated the timely introduction of local COVID sequencing, it is apparent that there is now a need to significantly enhance the local sequencing capability to provide timely resulting to enhance the Public Health response in NT. The current system can only test a maximum of 4 COVID isolates over 72 hours, with all the pre-testing handling totally manual. Despite this, NT was one of the first jurisdiction in Australia to detect and report the Omicron variant. This proposal is to firstly provide automation to the pre handling of specimens and to then significantly increase sequencing testing capacity. The limited genomic sequencing capability in NT has recently identified a delta strain as the primary agent in one community and in another community there were 2 different Omicron variants confirmed. An ability to test more isolates will provide a better epidemiological picture of the true incidence of the COVID variants in a community, which in turn informs the best practice Public Health response. This proposal will ensure Territory Pathology has the capability to meet the requirements detailed in the Whole genome sequencing prioritising document, in particular to address the statement: “Given limited capacity, screening for new variants of concern is not a current objective”.